Don't be surprised if the movie industry takes the cue from the music business and hits the courts running against online film piracy.
"If all our efforts over the next several months do not show ameliorization of this," outgoing Motion Picture Association of America chairman Jack Valenti told the Hollywood Reporter at the Cannes Film Festival, "we are not ruling out lawsuits."
Valenti had been attending a piracy roundtable discussion among film executives during the festival.
Valenti hasn't exactly been quiet in the recent past on whether the film industry would consider litigation as the music industry has done. In late April, he told the Senate Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary that the federal government needs to bring more resources to bear against online and DVD piracy.
“With large-scale involvement of organized crime in the international replication and export of pirated DVDs and the large and rapidly growing threat of Internet piracy, the very future of the filmed entertainment industry and other copyright industries is at stake,” he told the subcommittee.
“We are receiving a consistent message that promising leads in intellectual property cases are not being pursued because of a lack of trained tech-savvy investigators who are familiar with how to conduct intellectual property investigations,” he added.
Valenti had also urged Congress to give international agencies a "raised profile" for intellectual property enforcement, create a new ambassadorial position "subject to advice and consent of the Senate," and perhaps to create a new federal office of intellectual property protection to be led by a new assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Intellectual Property.
Valenti announced his pending retirement as the MPAA's chief earlier this year.
